How one department used Year 8 input to reform curricular thinking about content choice

Catherine Priggs and her history department colleagues were increasingly concerned that their curriculum was too narrow. They feared that major areas of history were being left out and that many of their own pupils were not seeing themselves, in their various ethnic, cultural and world identities, in the past. Priggs and colleagues decided that a key source of critique and constructive solution lay in the pupils themselves.

In order to prepare pupils for commenting on their curriculum, they sought academic help for teaching an intensive burst of pre-colonial African history to Year 8 pupils. Armed with this new knowledge, Year 8 pupils considered how their Year 7 work had been unhelpfully narrow in its historical perspective and made suggestions to the department on how to fix this across Key Stage 3.